The Black Hole
by SolitaryHighlandLass
Summary: Dean is in Purgatory, as is Cas. With no one left to draw help from, how will Sam get his brother back? And at what cost? Who will finally be able to help him?
1. Chapter 1

_**The Black Hole**_

_Chapter One_

Purgatory.

Dean was in _Purgatory._

The sudden silence in the lab after Crowley's disappearing act was drowned by the garbled screams in Sam's mind.

_Dean was in Purgatory!_

Suddenly, alarms all over the building started ringing out in a cacophony of choruses.

The shrill, deafening blast pulled Sam back into his distorted reality. The danger of his position if the human police showed up pierced through to his dazed mind and he stumbled to the nearest pristine stainless steel tabletop, putting out a hand to steady himself. Suddenly his whole body was shaking and he was taking shallow, quick breaths, trying to steady himself. A pungent smell of ammonia reached his nostrils and choked him, rising up from the bottles of chemicals in the shelves of the table. Another familiar smell was there, and his eyes darted across the room, abruptly alert. Was there a gas leak? He tried to move forward and stumbled over a plastic can on the floor. A liquid sloshed inside and he smelt gasoline.

Where could he go?

Where was Dean?

Who had rung the alarms?

The stark white light of the corridor hurt his eyes as he staggered out. Already he could hear sirens wailing in the distance. There was also an odd rumbling approaching the building. It took him a minute to identify the source, but suddenly he knew that it was a helicopter. Were the Special Forces here? He already knew the answer in his mind. Dick Roman was an immensely powerful industrialist and politician. If he had warned them of possible danger ahead of time, Sam was dead the minute the alarms had begun ringing.

After all this, it was practically laughable that it was the _human _police he needed to be worrying about. Sam moved swiftly down the rear staircase, heading for the rear exit on the ground floor. He had just barely reached it when the first of the black-clad SWAT soldiers smashed their way through to the front of the building.

The glass in the conference centre on the other side crumbled as Sam dove sideways into an ante-room opening across from the rear exit. He slammed the door shut and spun around, finding himself face-to-face with enormous monitors attached to the wall- feeding in footage from the entire campus of Sucrocorp. He was in the surveillance room. The dresses of three security guards lay on the floor, splattered with black goo. Presumably they had been Leviathans and had been sucked back into Purgatory along with Dick.

_Along with Dean._

There was a red light blinking on a panel in front of the monitors. Sam didn't know what it was, but the inky fluid covering it made him think that this was the panic button the guards had hit the moment they had realized something was wrong, before being sucked back in. He could see on the monitors that the building was surrounded on all sides by police and army vehicles. His throat dried up. There was no way he could get out. There was no place to hide. The ante room held absolutely nothing apart from the monitors, and the control table in front of it, both of which were stapled to the walls. There were three chairs, but that was it.

Already a minute or more had passed since the SWAT had first infiltrated the building. The only reason they had not yet found Sam was because they had approached it from the front. And Sam could see why. The rear of the building was enveloped in a security blanket. There was certainly no escape.

That was when he noticed the panel of switches on the wall beside the door. Moving closer, he immediately realized that the main switches, controlling the power in the whole building, were encased there. There was a sliding panel in the wall just below it and just inside, were the transformers. The nerve centre of all the electronics in the building were in this room.

Sam put it all together in a second.

The pungent smell. The gas leak. The switches. The lighter in his pocket. A bank robbery that he and Dean had foiled a long time back, together.

And the laboratory. Right after he'd pulled the silver tape off Kevin's mouth, the prophet had told him something- something about the lab, and how he had to destroy it. Sam thought about how it was just sitting there. High above the ground on the tenth floor, indifferent and aloof to the horrors it had witnessed. Sam didn't know what was in there. But whatever it was, he knew it had to go. More importantly, the Sucrocorp headquarters were eighteen floors high. No matter from which side the SWAT approached it- he thought about the helicopters- they would take some time to reach the lab.

13 seconds later, Sam was ready.

He thought he heard the soft tread of a booted footfall outside and smiled in spite of himself. They had made it easier for him. In one swift motion, he reached out and turned off all the switches in the panels.

…

Abruptly, the whole building plunged into darkness.

For the SWAT soldier right outside, it was like falling straight into a black hole, all the colours and vision from the world suddenly sucked away. He paused for a moment, disoriented and didn't even have time to take a breath when a blinding pain erupted at the side of his head. It was like being hit with a brick. There was a white flash in front of his eyes, and he crumpled to the floor without a sound. One and a half minutes later, he was lying face down on the monitor room's floor, stripped to his underwear.

…

It took Sam five minutes of groping through the pitch-black darkness in the rear staircase to get to the tenth floor. The infra-red goggles helped quite a bit. The eerie, flickering green world they created was jumpy and uncomfortable, but he managed to make his way to the last bend in the staircase without incident. Almost at once he realized something was wrong. The corridor around the corner was emitting a soft light- something which should have been impossible at this moment. He crept around, fingers tense on the trigger of the soldier's gun and saw that emergency lights had come on all along the floor of the corridor, lighting the blackness with pools of pale yellow light. The lights in the laboratory had not gone off at all. It must have its own generator. It seemed as though his plans for a flashy exit had abruptly hit a dead end. He had seen the low beams of military flashlights sweeping the floors in great arcs right up to the third floor. If the SWAT managed to make their way to the lab before he was done, he would be in serious trouble.

After a second of consternation, he decided to go ahead. It really didn't make much of a difference. A deathly silence hung about the place, stretching for a minimum of two floors in all directions. Sam pulled off his goggles and strode into the lab.

There were the bottles of cleaners and solvents, stacked up on the table beside the Sucrocorp packaging boxes. There was the can of gasoline on the floor. Quickly, he tore the uniforms of the guards into strips, dipped them into the can and tied them together in knots. He placed one wet end near the door, wound the strips to the area where Roman had stood- and disappeared. He pulled down two more bottles and poured the contents of the first into the second. He placed the bottle in the middle of the area, dipping the other end of the strips into it. He poured gasoline over all the lab apparatus within three feet. Then he tucked another bottle which emitted a choking, terrible smell under his arm, first spraying about half of the contents into the air, all along the outside corridor.

It was done.

Finally, he pulled out the lighter from his pocket.

…

"You can't come up here!"

The SWAT units, one on the seventh floor and one on the thirteenth, jumped as a staticy voice crackled out into their ears. Their radios had picked up a desperate plea from a fellow soldier.

"You can't come anywhere near the tenth floor- the gas lines in the lab have burst and the whole place is flooded with gas; it's impossible to breathe!" the voice panted. And suddenly, the figure to which it belonged leapt into the green vision of the unit on the lower floors. An impossibly tall figure swathed in a black SWAT uniform. One of their own, and he was giving a dire warning. Both the groups halted, uncertain.

The unit commander on the seventh floor baulked. Here was a stranger, a soldier under _his_ command, giving _him _orders! "Who the hell are you?" he demanded, irked.

But for the one higher up, there was no such luxury.

It was an entirely different story up there. They were above the alleged leak, and if there was an explosion, the commander knew there was no escape. The building would cave in on itself and trapped here, they would be burnt alive in a living hell. And now they were on the twelfth floor and he sniffed the air suspiciously. Once. Twice.

The pungent, choking smell of escaping gas punched him straight in the face.

For one second, a cold fear gripped his heart and he was frozen in place. Then he was barking orders into the radio.

"Retreat! Confirmed gas leak - all units fall back from tenth floor immediately! Delta One, follow me!"

The heavy, booted tread of running soldiers echoed throughout the building as the soldiers raced back up the stairs, trying to get as far away from death as possible, to the choppers from which even now, ladders would be dangling, ready to haul up the soldiers from the roof of Sucrocorp. The commander down below blinked in amazement at the dizzying turn of events. Then he, too, was talking into his radio urgently, as he and his unit fell back, dividing themselves between the rear and main staircases, rushing back down as fast as possible. No one spared another look for the mysterious soldier who had sounded the initial warning. And then, just as they reached the first floor, it happened.

The tenth floor blew apart with such fury that personnel on the ground were caught unawares, deafened by the blast. They dodged behind anything they could find to protect themselves on the oncoming rain of metal and glass. The soldiers now safely in the choppers above crashed into each other as the massive Black Hawks trembled from the aftershock; shrapnel pattered against their black casings. The first floor echoed with the boots of the stampeding men as a desperate rush to get out of the collapsing building ensued. The men at the rear exit practically punched the doors out of the way as they flew out of the building. One of them happened to notice the man lying face-down in the ante room and managed to drag him out. The ones from the main staircase ran out of the smashed glass front of Sucrocorp, shattered glass scrunching under their boots.

And then, out in the open, everyone stared open-mouthed as the headquarters of Sucrocorp completed its spectacular demise, crumbling into itself, fire eating into the heart of the building.

No one noticed a tall figure creep to the back of a military truck. No one noticed as he pulled off the SWAT gear and threw it into the back of the truck, and then hauled himself over the black wall, the barbed wire and leapt down onto the other side. Sam, now in his plaid jacket, checked shirt and jeans, ran across the road to where a non-descript blue car waited- an escape plan he and Dean had kept, just in case. Well, the case was here alright. He threw himself in and revved it up. The car roared out into the road at the side of Sucrocorp- the road where Bobby had drawn up in the car, in the maid's body. There were the chain link fences with the security cameras. The building on the other side of the car park was now a mess, but in front of it, there was the wide driveway with grass swarthes on either side- with the Sucrocorp sign in the middle. There was the spot across the road where he and Dean had sat just the previous night, hacking into the cameras of Sucrocorp. Ad there was Baby, embedded into the sign, smashed and injured. Sam's heart wrenched into pieces as the car roared by her. He was leaving Baby behind, and Dean was gone, and so was Cas, and so was Bobby! Tears blurred his vision and despair, black and terrible, threatened to suck him in. He had never, ever felt more alone.

But then he had left the crumbling remains of Sucrocorp behind, the roads rushing by as he headed out of state. His jaw was clenched and fire burned in his eyes. His mind was narrowed down to one purpose, and one purpose only.

He was going to find a way to bring his brother back.


	2. Chapter 2

Second Chapter

_May 27__th__2010_

_The rain swept across in icy sheets, the wind whistled through the trees and the grayish light of the sun bleakly stole in through gray clouds racing across the sky. The street was deserted, puddles overflowing with muddy black water. The young boy ran across, shielding himself from the sleet with a book, wrapped in a slick raincoat. Under the shroud, he was smiling._

_Nora._

_She was better than__**anything**____that had ever happened to him. Screw the 'plan' and screw MIT -they didn't matter anymore. Actually, he wondered if they ever had. His parents had been the ones to decide that future for him; he'd never been allowed to do anything but go along with it. But he was done- he didn't give a flying crap about them and their__**plans**__. Sometimes he would silently thank the Winchesters- the ones he had wanted to hand over to the Devil - for a shot at rebelling in a 'healthy, non –Satanic way', for his first experience of freedom, for making him see what Sam saw in one day._

_God, he owed them._

_He didn't know where they were, but he fervently hoped that they were safe and kicking it in the ass._

_Gary unlocked the door and stepped inside, shutting the door on the cold wind. The house was echoingly empty and silent and he stopped, immediately sensing something wrong._

_His mother had been home when he had left for Nora's house. His father's car was in the driveway. His sister had been at cheerleading practice, but hadn't she returned since?_

"_Mom?"_

_There was no response._

_His voice echoed eerily in the silence. Only a table lamp glimmered at the far end of the hall, in the room with the pool table. As he stood near the door, blinking around in confusion, the light suddenly switched off._

_He jumped, startled, but less than a second later it was back on again._

_Odd._

_And then he saw it, on the floor in front of him. The ruby-red liquid was slowly trickling down the stairs, and in the gray light, it looked a lot like-_

"_MOM! DAD! SYDNEY!"_

_The overwhelming rush of panic choked him and he couldn't breathe. Slipping and sliding in the blood, he ran up the stairs. There was a light on in his room, the oak-wood floors gleaming in the beam from the half-open door. He raced to it and slammed it open._

_The half-skinned bodies lay piled on the floor, mouths frozen in screams and faces contorted into the shape of the horror that had been their last emotion before their hearts gave way. The red-hot knives and cleavers still glowed on the bedside table. Standing in the middle of it all was a woman with curly blonde hair and eyes that should have been a pretty green, but were now inhuman and completely black. As he fell to his knees, his parent's blood soaking his jeans, making a sound that was more animal than human, she turned - his next-door neighbor, Alice._

_She smiled, her ruby-red lips curving up and her nose crinkling._

"_Oh, hello, Gary. Remember me? I'm the one you exorcised out of that pretty little girl, Nora. It's__**so**__nice to see you again."_

_The blonde woman was circling him, his brain numbed in utter shock. Sidney was tied to the chair front of the computer, alive, gagged and splattered in blood from head to toe. Her tears were dry salt tracks and he stared at the way the glistened under the harsh white light, not taking in anything around him._

"_Did you really think you would go unpunished?" Alice asked softly._

_Four other men stood by her, eyes gleaming black, hands and faces covered in blood._

"_Exorcising me, taking Dean and Sam Winchester out of our hands. Three months, Gary. That was three months ago. Oh, believe me, I would have happily come and killed you in the most dramatic way possible the next day, but my colleagues seemed to feel that this is better. You know, a few months of knowing what it is to be happy. And then spending the rest of eternity on the other side, burning and knowing that what happened to your family here- it's all you, boy. You did this to them." She put her face close to his. "Never, ever forget that, Gary," she whispered. "You did this to them. Your mother and father were skinned alive because of your choices."_

_She straightened up._

"_And now, let me introduce you to the Morgan family, about to be re-carved."_

_She held out her hand and a man handed her a cell phone. Suddenly, the sound of harsh breathing filled the room. A face filled the screen of the phone. She smiled widely and showed it to him._

"_Why, hello again, Nora."_

_This wasn't happening, his mind whispered. This is a lie. A dream. A nightmare. Wake up, it urged. Wake up, Gary. It'll be over. It'll be gone._

_Why am I not waking up?_

_The woman was watching him, satisfaction spreading across her freckled face. She came near him again, her face close to his, her black eyes searching him hungrily._

"_You see, Gary?" she whispered. "Nora and her family are about to die… because of you. Your parents are dead, because of you. Your sister will die- again because of you. But you…" her pink tongue moistened her red lips as her eyes glittered black- "Oh, you're going to live, Gary. For a long, long time. We'll make sure of that. Guess why? We're winning, Gary!"_

_Thunder crashed and lightning glared outside as the storm whipped up into a frenzy._

"_Last night, Sam Winchester said yes to our God. Today, right at this moment, the fight goes down- and we're gonna win. And then… we'll see that you live a long, healthy life- knowing to the last day that__**you did this**__- and when you're done, we'll make sure you go down the hole you sent me into. That's when the__**real**____fun will begin- and boy, I'm gonna love it!"_

_Happy, bubbling laughter filled his ears as Gary shook on the floor. It's not real, he thought. Wake up. Come on- wake up!_

_And suddenly the sound was gone._

_Suddenly he was kneeling in a completely empty room, floor dry, his sister untied and unconscious in the chair, his parent's bodies gone. His heart was racing and he scrambled up, hardly daring to breathe. He wanted to hear his mom in the kitchen, calling him down for lunch. He wanted to shake his sister from her sleep, now that he was finally awake from the terrifying dream. He wanted to rush downstairs and see them alive-_

"_It wasn't a dream."_

_Gary stumbled backwards into the bed. His hands were shaking violently and his eyes were frozen wide open._

"_Hello, Gary."_

_Numbly, he took in the small, bald man in the black suit who was standing in the doorway._

"_I'm Crowley, the king- well, the__**new**____king of Hell. Pleasure and all that, I'm sure."_

_His burning eyes went to the spot his parent's bodies had lain. The place was empty; no sign that there had ever been a single drop of blood shed there. Crowley's eyes followed his gaze._

"_I cleaned up," he said matter-of-factly, with the air of someone who had just taken care of a toddler's spilt milk, "I thought you might appreciate it. Your parents now lie in the Housatonic town cemetery. Your sister has no memory of all this unpleasant business." _

_The demon narrowed his eyes._

"_You, Gary, have been dabbling with very wrong crowds. Thankfully, you didstop that rather idiotic plan of yours to turn the Winchesters in or I'm not sure how wiling I would have been to call that one off you. But now it would seem that I owe you; so here's my debt repayment. You see, just a few minutes ago the big fight had the big finale, and now Sam Winchester's gone, and so is Lucifer. Thus it would seem that I'm the new boss in charge. I'll make sure they don't bother you again."_

_The room was filled with soft gray light for the rain had_ _quietened to a drizzle, a soft breeze swooshing in from the open windows._

"_Don't__**bother**____me again?" he asked, and his voice broke._

"_Yes. To be quite honest, this has less to do with you and much more to do with the fact that she sided with Lucifer- but the end result's the same, right? You live, your sister lives, I get my revenge, everyone lives happily ever after."_

"_And my parents?" he whispered, awareness finally crashing through the haze of terror and grief. "What about my parents?"_

_Crowley raised his eyebrows. "What about them?"_

_Sobs were finally escaping from his broken heart- he couldn't speak, he couldn't see. "Bring them back!" he shouted, and his words echoed in the empty house, mocking him. "I- now!"_

_Crowley looked closely at the form curled up on the clean grey carpet in front of him. "Sorry- no can do."_

_He was really crying now, pounding the floor with his hands. "Why? Why not?"_

"_Because everything's got to have a price- and this is yours. You can't expect to deal with the Devil and just walk away, kiddo."_

_The room went in and out of focus as he clung to the very edge of his reason, but he could feel himself slipping into the black hole that lay beyond._

"_Please…" he whispered, "Please… I'll do anything… anything…"_

"_You can't." Crowley paused, and for a second the demon actually looked sympathetic, almost regretful._

_But then he straightened the lapels of his suit._

"_Well, best be on my way. Stay out of trouble, Gary. The deal we've made holds good only as long as you keep up your end of it."_

_A tear blurred his eye, and Crowley was gone._

_Alone in the monstrous, empty house, with his sister unconscious and his consciousness slipping, Gary's world came crashing down around him and he was drowning- drowning- and he didn't know if he would ever surface again-_

…

"H P Lovecraft."

The cursor blinked on the screen as Sam pressed search.

It was midnight, the wind howling and the rain hammering on the roof of the motel room. Two days had passed since his cracker of an escape from the headquarters of Sucrocorp

.

_Two days since Dean was in purgatory._

Every time his mind turned to this thought, he took a swig of the cheap wine from the bottle beside the laptop. He had made his way through four bottles in the last hour. The letters were blurred on the screen and he didn't realize that he already had made this search once, the results printed out in the bundle of papers next to the bed.

He wasn't getting anywhere.

Frustration tore at his heart and he gripped the edge of the table, his heart pumping frantically, his brain threatening to give way under its own thoughts. He blinked a few times. He was also feeling a suspicious urge to cry. His throat burned and he couldn't breathe, he couldn't think, he couldn't control himself and a sudden sob broke out. The next second it was gone, and he was again abruptly running on the manic sense of purpose that had sustained him for a few hours after his escape, before he pulled out a spanner from the tool box and attacked that stupid car, hacking at its stupid blue door and stupid flimsy glass, again and again and again until he collapsed beside it, his whole body wracking with his shuddering breaths.

_Dean was gone!_

He slammed the keyboard, his burning eyes boring into the screen. Just random strings of letters, nothing more, but… he had to keep typing. Or with each second, _Dean passed further and further away…_

"NO!"

With a cry he hurled the table away from him; his laptop fell the floor and smashed and so did the bottle of wine. He staggered to the bed, too drunk to notice or care that his hand was bleeding from the sharp shards of glass on the floor, and fell on top of it, fully clothed. His exhausted, over-worked brain sank into the blackness, sleep quietening the raging grief and anger in his heart.

…

The next morning dawned grey and soggy.

Sam woke up blearily, banging on the alarm clock to stop the annoying beeping. The drink had gone straight to his head, but he was more resistant now. He just lay there for a minute, breathing.

_Three days._

_Maybe it would be third time lucky._

But then he almost laughed at the suggestion of 'lucky' related to a Winchester, all in the same sentence.

_Where do I start?_

_The gates to Purgatory need to be opened._

Yes. That was what Cas and Crowley had done, via a spell: the same spell they had used to open the gate again and let the souls back in. Except the Leviathans had resisted… and then all the shit of the past year had taken place. He had that spell.

But when they did it, they also let out the Leviathans. This time, if he allowed them to escape again, there would be no going back. That spell could not control the souls and allowed all of them to escape. So using that spell was out.

_Well, fuck._

_What now?_

_H P Lovecraft._

He had also opened a door to Purgatory, but that time, only one soul had escaped. How had he controlled the flow? Had he controlled it at all? There was only one way to find out.

_I need that spell._

There it was- a solid place to start from.

…

_There are not enough bees in this realm. _  
_  
_  
The black wind of Purgatory whispered through the cream coloured trenchcoat as Castiel surveyed the undulating black forests of Purgatory from a black tree top.


End file.
